this is a post about the game World of Warcraft, which I play and will likely continue to play at least until my free game time runs out sometime near the end of 2026. World of Warcraft has many, many criticisms, way too many to list here, in fact, and a major criticism (and certainly a beef that I have with it) is the way that it treats its fantasy races: most are an analogue of one or several real-life races with extra stuff stapled on. this post is certainly about that, but it’s not about beef, it’s about chicken.

you know peanut chicken? by this I mean, basically, chicken satay in a peanut sauce. Satay is originally Indonesian, but these awesome skewers have spread all over the world and are now often associated with a totally random assortment of Asian countries; you can probably find recipes for it that claim to be authentically Thai, Chinese, Malaysian, Filipino etc. It also exists in World of Warcraft.

Skewered Peanut Chicken, in World of Warcraft, is a food item that was introduced in patch 5.0.1. this was the introductory patch for the Mists of Pandaria expansion, which is the one where you go to Fantasy China and it’s full of panda people. there are many criticisms you can, and should, make about Mists of Pandaria. interestingly, it did very well in China, perhaps because the unique and bizarre micro-racisms it represents in its stories are micro-racisms that are popular in Chinese narrative. We don’t have exact sales stats for Mists of Pandaria within China, but we know that the Chinese servers peaked at 1 million players playing at once, which represents over a fourth of the worldwide sales of Mists of Pandaria, I think? anyway, all that is another beef for someone else who is educated on these things to make.

the point is that Mists of Pandaria introduces Fantasy China, AKA Pandaria, and it also introduces Skewered Peanut Chicken as a foodstuff. it’s important to note that the lore of this entire story arc is that Pandaria has been totally uncontacted for thousands of years? Every single panda you run into during the main story is like “oh! what the hell are you!” and it’s a whole thing. They have their own local baddies they’ve been dealing with; they have never met you or your baddies before. however, they do apparently have peanut chicken.

so let’s talk about the chicken first. Pandarians have met chickens. Domestic chicken actually does come from (southeast) Asia in real life, so it’s not a huge stretch that it comes from Fantasy Asia as well. The red junglefowl is their wild equivalent, they share huge swaths of genes and can even interbreed. Wikipedia says:

A landmark 2020 Nature study that fully sequenced 863 chickens across the world suggests that all domestic chickens originate from a single domestication event of red junglefowl whose present-day distribution is predominantly in southwestern China, northern Thailand and Myanmar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken

so that’s neat! chicken comes from Asia. fantasy chicken comes from fantasy Asia. simple and clean.

there’s a problem though. there’s peanuts in this thing.

so where the hell do non-fantasy peanuts come from? well, simply enough, they come from non-fantasy South America. as people love to say, they’re not “actually nuts” by the strictest definition. They’re loosely related to peas and beans and stuff. again, our good friend Wikipedia chimes in:

Genetic analysis suggests the hybridization may have occurred only once and gave rise to A. monticola, a wild form of peanut that occurs in a few limited locations in northwestern Argentina, or in southeastern Bolivia, where the peanut landraces with the most wild-like features are grown today…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut — god I love quoting articles with names like this

non-fantasy peanuts left the non-fantasy Americas and were cultivated worldwide in the 19th century thanks to the knock-on effects of non-fantasy colonialism, and non-fantasy Asia is now by far the world’s largest non-fantasy peanut grower. But we’re NOT talking about non-fantasy peanuts or non-fantasy Asia. we are talking about fantasy peanuts and fantasy Asia. Pandaria is an uncontacted, pre-colonial fantasy China. They did not get their peanuts from fantasy colonialism. They just have them already.

okay, fine, so do peanuts *have* to be from South America? Can’t they be from China in this fantasy world? Is that such a stretch? Does World of Warcraft even have a fantasy South America?

YES! IT DOES! and it makes everything SO MUCH MORE COMPLICATED!

let’s talk about Fantasy South America in World of Warcraft. introduced in patch 8.0.1, much later than Pandaria, Fantasy South America is called Zandalar, and is the origin of Trolls in World of Warcraft. this is… interesting, because the Troll race in World of Warcraft is one of those mash-up stereotype races, with different parts stapled on. Troll are Fantasy Maya, but they’re also Fantasy West African and Fantasy Jamaican and maybe even a little bit Fantasy Egyptian, which is REALLY complicated, and, again, totally out of my scope to criticize, aside from saying I hate it when you click on one and she plays a voice clip like “come get da voodoo” and you remember that you’re playing World of Warcraft. and now they also play voice clips that say things like “Zandalar forever!” which is a reference to Black Panther, and all media is a disgusting self-referential stew. anyway, Fantasy South America exists.

OK, so Fantasy South America exists, but do peanuts have to come from there? I mean, if our fantasy peanuts only exist in Fantasy China, isn’t it simpler to say that one of the many ways in which World of Warcraft diverges from reality is that peanuts came from Asia?

another problem: SKEWERED PEANUT CHICKEN IS NOT THE ONLY REFERENCE TO PEANUTS IN THE GAME.

okay, wait. first i have to mention another reason that Fantasy South America kind of being the same as Fantasy Egypt and Fantasy West Africa is so horribly complicated. the reason is that we have to be careful not to confuse it with the *other* Fantasy Africa. see, there is a different Fantasy Africa, called Nagrand, introduced ALL THE WAY back in patch 2.0.1. it’s where the Orcs came from, who are really, unambiguously, Fantasy African. Nagrand literally has elephants and giraffes and diamond mines and heaps of fantasy colonialism. It is unequivocally fantasy Africa.

so, great, why am I mentioning this? (non-fantasy) peanuts didn’t come from (non-fantasy) africa. well, because this is an NPC named Peanut:

Peanut is actually the first mention of peanuts in World of Warcraft; he was added in patch 2.1.0. He’s a baby fantasy elephant (Elekk) from fantasy Africa (Nagrand) but he was named after a peanut, which means peanuts were already known AND associated with elephants, which kind of implies there’s an in-world fantasy circus industry that is known for exploiting elephants and for having peanuts as a snackfood, which is just a lot to unpack all at once so let’s not bother. Peanut predates Skewered Peanut Chicken by many years. Whatever, he’s an elephant, not food, can we move on?

THERE IS ANOTHER PEANUT ITEM. and this is where it gets crazy.

The Bag of Peanuts is a nearly useless food item added in patch 3.0.3, after Peanut the elephant, but long before Skewered Peanut Chicken. it’s from the frozen far-north continent Northrend, which, I don’t know, it has a lot of things going on racially; there are Fantasy Inuit, Fantasy Lumberjacks and Fantasy Vikings there, and hundreds of animated skeletons, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. but you find the Bag of Peanuts at a location called the Amphitheater of Anguish, so again, peanuts are associated with watching performances in-universe. the Amphitheater of Anguish is located in Zul’Drak. if you’ve been paying attention, you might notice something: that’s a troll name. Zul’Drak is a troll settlement.

THAT’S WHY THERE ARE PEANUTS. THE FANTASY SOUTH AMERICANS BROUGHT THEIR FANTASY PEANUTS FROM FANTASY SOUTH AMERICA TO FANTASY (??? ARCTIC CIRCLE ??? ALASKA ??? GREENLAND ??? SKELETON HELL ???) AND CULTIVATED THEM THERE. thus, even fantasy peanuts are from fantasy South America. but they’re also from Fantasy China.

actually, there is a bigger problem here: the chickens. as i said, it’s fine that Fantasy China has fantasy chickens. that’s neat and tidy. that’s regular.

OH MY GOD THERE ARE SO MANY OTHER CHICKENS IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT

i’m pretty sure the first chickens in World of Warcraft were released together; a regular white Chicken and the cute black Ancona Chicken, both added in 1.11.1.

so where did the rest of Azeroth, AKA Fantasy Earth, get their chickens from?

this is where i have decided it all comes together: before Pandaria was isolated. see, i said that Fantasy China was totally uncontacted, but that’s not entirely true. apparently, there was some period of time, at least ten thousand years before the Mists of Pandaria expansion happened, where Pandaria wasn’t cut off from everything, and… somehow no knowledge of what it was like in there survived, but whatever. according to Wowpedia again, this might neatly solve all of our problems. not only were humans I guess on Pandaria way back when, but even Zandalari trolls might have been on the scene, so I guess I’m willing to concede that they could have brought some peanuts over and brought some chicken back. I GUESS. the timeline is all messed up, though. non-fantasy domesticated peanuts have only been proven to be like eight thousand years old, and that’s also around our estimate of when chickens were domesticated. World of Warcraft cannot possibly be the fantasy equivalent to a pre-modern day, or a modern day, because peanuts and chicken were domesticated too long ago.

fine! whatever! let them have it! the most important way that World of Warcraft diverges from the real world is in fact the point in history when peanuts and chickens were domesticated. this is my hill and i’m going to die on it.